Typos in ebooks

[Patricia29]

Originally Posted by rhadin

It's not Sony, its the publisher of the ebook. Sony is no more responsible for the errors than Barnes & Noble is for errors in pbooks that you buy at their stores. Unlike Amazon who converts ebook files to its own formats and thus can introduce errors, the files Sony sells are publisher provided.

If I buy something from COSTCO, books included, and I find them to be substandard, I return them to COSTCO. When I buy books from Sony, there is no recourse.
If you are a reseller, it is your responsibility to ensure you are selling a quality product.
I have now been waiting over a month for Sony to respond to my first complaint.
My latest problem with a Sony download is text size. The book is The Traitor by Stephen Coonts, the text is so small, even when I maximize the size, it is still difficult to read. So far Sony's only suggestion is to redownload it, which I have done, but it is still no better.

[seajewel]

I was just looking at a sample copy of Midnight Tides by Steven Erikson, and realized how many typos there are, just by skimming a few pages. It really bothers me that I would have to pay $10 for an ebook that is just chock full of errors. Especially in the case of the Malazan series, when names are often mistyped, spelled Beru on one page and Bern on another, or Coll and then Coil (i know there are two separate characters with the name, but in the ebook they're definitely mistakenly interchanged) it really detracts from the reading experience because so many of the names are strange, I end up not knowing what is the "correct" spelling of a character's name. I literally would have to look it up online to figure out what the correct name is. Tiste Edur in the Midnight TIdes sample shows up as TIFTE Edur in some places.

it really would bother me *slightly* less if we didn't have to pay so much, as much as or more than paperbacks cost, knowing that the paperbacks do not contain nearly as many errors. Just wanted to rant out of frustration.. I love ebooks, but I feel publishers have a long way to go before they realize they are not promoting and supporting the ebook market as they should.

ETA: the sample copy of Midnight Tides I refer to is the excerpt from Amazon Kindle edition.

[corona]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Vince Flynn's books do seem to have a particularly horrible problem. I bought one not so long ago for my Kindle, and it was missing all the quotation marks, dashes, and full stops. I kept it, because it was a good story, but the almost complete lack of punctuation made it a "challenge" to read, especially the dialogue parts of it.

You can move on to William Gaddis!

[cmdahler]

Originally Posted by Patricia29

If I buy something from COSTCO, books included, and I find them to be substandard, I return them to COSTCO. When I buy books from Sony, there is no recourse.

Yes, there is. You bought that book from Sony with a credit card. If you find the product that you bought flawed or otherwise not-as-advertised (basically, any reason that you would be justified in returning a print book for a refund), then you can ask Sony for a refund. If they refuse, simply dispute the charge with your credit card company. Chargebacks are really expensive, relatively speaking, for any company. If people started doing this when they found a number of typographical errors in the ebook or other formatting errors or issues that make the book substandard, Sony (or Amazon, or whoever) would quickly start to clean up their act. As long as people keep the mindset that "there is no recourse" and don't do the simple act of calling the credit card customer service line and disputing the charge (takes 5 minutes, and you've got your money back), the booksellers have no financial incentive to improve their product.

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by cmdahler

Yes, there is. You bought that book from Sony with a credit card. If you find the product that you bought flawed or otherwise not-as-advertised (basically, any reason that you would be justified in returning a print book for a refund), then you can ask Sony for a refund. If they refuse, simply dispute the charge with your credit card company. Chargebacks are really expensive, relatively speaking, for any company. If people started doing this when they found a number of typographical errors in the ebook or other formatting errors or issues that make the book substandard, Sony (or Amazon, or whoever) would quickly start to clean up their act. As long as people keep the mindset that "there is no recourse" and don't do the simple act of calling the credit card customer service line and disputing the charge (takes 5 minutes, and you've got your money back), the booksellers have no financial incentive to improve their product.

Now that's an excellent idea. I'll certainly check it out.

Regards, Alex

[Quexos]

I'm currently reading "IT" by Stephen king on my e-reader and I have read almost 150 pages and I must say there are so many typos and missing spaces that I am flummoxed by such errors.
Countless missing spaces such as "shewas" for "she was", Italics wrongly set, many times "comers" where in the print you have "corners", one case of "aubumhaired" for "auburn-haired" and a few cases of a wrong letter such as "be went" for "he went" ...
Do you guys think this is a OCR error issue or something else ?

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Quexos

I'm currently reading "IT" by Stephen king on my e-reader and I have read almost 150 pages and I must say there are so many typos and missing spaces that I am flummoxed by such errors.
Countless missing spaces such as "shewas" for "she was", Italics wrongly set, many times "comers" where in the print you have "corners", one case of "aubumhaired" for "auburn-haired" and a few cases of a wrong letter such as "be went" for "he went" ...
Do you guys think this is a OCR error issue or something else ?

Classic OCR errors. Complain to the publisher. Complain to the retailer. Get a refund.

[bizzybody]

Since comers is such a rarely used and archaic word in English, almost always with the word all before it, any time English OCR software thinks it sees "comers" it should be flagged, tagged and bagged as corners unless all is right before it. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/All+comers

OCR software needs a lot more work on discriminating between lowercase m and rn. I've seen books where nearly every instance of each was recognized as the other. Same thing for some other troublesome letter pairs. A "Does this word really exist in English?" sanity check would cure tons of OCR errors. Of course that would require OCR software to include spelling and grammar checking too.

[GeoffC]

OCR software is still not good enough - nor, it seems, do the publishers care about the quality until there are complaints.

One reason why books at DP go through 3 levels of proofing check after OCR...

[Quexos]

I see.
However this remains unforgivable. All that is needed after a text has been OCR'd is for someone to proof-read it. Now don't tell me publishers can't afford that or did not think of that.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Quexos

I see.
However this remains unforgivable. All that is needed after a text has been OCR'd is for someone to proof-read it. Now don't tell me publishers can't afford that or did not think of that.

Either the publisher decided not to do any proofing, or someone messed up and released the raw text instead of the proofed text.

In the first case, get a refund, in the second case, get a refund and wait for them to fix it before buying again.

[DreamWriter]

Having to read around typos or mis-scans in a book can certainly detract from the story! I've seen a lot of problems in e-books as well. It is disappointing. I don't understand why publishers don't take more care to produce a high-quality product.

Particularly in the case of indie books, I suggest that you contact the author/publisher. In most cases, they do care and any errors will be corrected.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Quexos

I see.
However this remains unforgivable. All that is needed after a text has been OCR'd is for someone to proof-read it. Now don't tell me publishers can't afford that or did not think of that.

Like most businesses, publishers are looking at ways of saving money. Proff-redding was one of the things they dropped several years ago. Instead of paying people to do it, they print advance reader copies which the author sends out to fans. The fans then report any mistakes they notice and those get fixed. The ones that don't get noticed stay in the book.

[Caltsar]

Most of the eBooks I buy are from B&N, and while I tend to stick to sci-fi and fantasy (as well as some non-fiction), the books I've bought have no more errors than the paper books I read. I've personally been happy with their quality, though I'll be the first to complain when errors that can easily be handled by skimming through the book or running a spell checker show up.

It does seem that newer eBooks are getting to be higher quality these days. I remember when I bought a few ebooks for my Palm back in the day, they were filled with ridiculous OCR errors and looked like the publisher didn't even open the file before sending it out.

[Under the Covers]

More than just typos, one recently downloaded book contained all sorts of usage errors (too for to, roll for role, parish for perish, etc. ad nauseum), along with flat-out grammatical and sentence construction errors -- too many fundamental errors to attribute them to just typos, scanning, or proofing errors. After that book, I'd be happy to see a well written book with only typos.